Man in Evolution by G. de Purucker

Appendix — II

Theosophy and the New Science

By Blair A. Moffett

The facts about man and cosmos enunciated by the ancient wisdom will stand,
because they are derived from a matured vision not alone of the realm of
physical matter and its transformations, but of the totality of being in all its
multiple aspects and planes. Today scientists limit themselves largely to a
method of inductive investigation, applied almost wholly to the phenomena of the
physical universe. In the life sciences, research is concerned principally with
our physical earth, considered as a single plane or sphere of life. The
theosophist has an advantage in that he employs deductive thought to proceed
from time-tested universals down to particulars and then, by reasoning from the
known to the unknown, applies inductive analysis to test the axioms of theosophy
by going from particulars back to universals.

The expectation is, however, that the findings of physical science, as these
accrue over time, will corroborate and even verify elements of the more
universal statements of theosophy, particularly those that concern earth-plane
phenomena. And such has been the case, in abundance, since the late 1920s when
Dr. G. de Purucker first presented the lectures that were later edited for this
book. We now have a New Science — a New Physics, a New Biology, a New
Astronomy, etc. — and there are fewer basic quarrels between theosophy and this
new science. Unhappily, most scientists and many theosophists are not aware that
this is so. The material in this Appendix is intended to help both become more
cognizant of some of the more significant convergences between the two
perspectives. Both kinds of thinkers are, if open-minded, fellow searchers after
truth; and truth must ultimately be one, not two.

THE NATURE OF MATTER

Little need be added to Dr. de Purucker's analysis showing modern science's
dematerialization of the physical universe as a result of its own findings.
Several developments in nuclear physics since the 1920s and '30s have more than
confirmed the essential statements of theosophy regarding "matter." So
illusive has the matter of science become that physicists now state that an
electron is neither a particle nor a wave, "but an entity that defies every
attempt at pictorial description." (1)
The electron, or any other so-called material particle, can be studied solely by
giving up the quest for a unified description of all of its properties and
confining attention to a restricted range of experience. Only then can its
behavior be understood as either a corpuscle or a wave, depending on how the
boundaries of the field of interest are defined.

It is no longer legitimate to ascribe to such elementary particles the
substantiality of pellets of matter: they are nonmaterial structures, and in a
very true sense the new physics has become
metaphysics because it deals with factors beyond visibility and
seemingly beyond natural law, factors that can be coped with experimentally only
by a statistical law. This is the famous "Principle of Indeterminacy,"
so named in 1927 by its formulator, the great German theoretical physicist,
Werner Heisenberg. Individual atoms and electrons in their motions and actions
are found to exhibit an element of unpredictability — a kind of free will or
choice-making — so that even though they may be of the same kind or class, all
do not do the same things. As a result, in atomic and subatomic phenomena strict
causality, as this has been understood in classical physics, cannot really be
applied. Predictability and determinism break down. (2)

So malleable and uncertain has the material aspect of the universe become in
the vision of modern physicists that as recently as 1971 a book was published,
titled The Search fora Theory of Matter(3), which
honestly acknowledges the inability of the new physics to devise a theory able
to explain the phenomena it studies. We are indeed witnessing a revolution in
science's view of the physical universe, one that has not yet reached its full
course nor come anywhere near its destination. But the course has begun, and
contemporary findings continue to shatter classical notions about the universe.
Astrophysicists, for example, now realize that an evolution of the elements
occurs within suns, beginning with the transformation or transmutation of
hydrogen into helium, the next heavier element of matter; but they don't fully
understand how this happens. In all the stars, processes are going on which
build up the atoms one by one into more and more complex elements or material
structures. Thus, as Jacob Bronowski put it: "Matter itself evolves.
The word comes from Darwin and biology, but it is the word that changed
physics in my lifetime." (4) That is a
remarkable statement, reflecting as it does a dawning recognition by physical
scientists of a definite evolutionary course in material substance. On the
physical plane this very much resembles the more recondite process of emanation
of substances and forces from inner or more ethereal and spiritual planes
downward and outward to other, more material planes, as explained herein by Dr.
de Purucker. The words of Bronowski epitomize perfectly how differently the new
science views the universe, which in the 19th century was seen as simply a vast
material machine in which every product was predetermined.

A good example is our sun, until recently regarded by science as a steady,
well-ordered machine about which there remained little to be learned except the
nature of the nuclear reactions believed to be going on in its heart. Now
astrophysicists have been forced to rethink long-held theories about how the sun
works, especially the notion that it is burning at exceedingly high
temperatures. In 1974 Dr. Henry Hill of the University of Arizona, Tucson,
trying to determine precisely the diameter of the sun, discovered that it is
vibrating. Its limb or edge oscillates back and forth about every sixty minutes
over a distance of about twenty kilometers. It is in fact breathing in and out
in a natural vibration at various frequencies, a phenomenon that has been
compared to the ringing of a bell.

Studies of the oscillating sun carried out at Birmingham University,
England, suggest that the sun may be much less dense at its center than had been
thought, and have only half the temperature assumed by current models: 7 instead
of 15 million degrees. Many scientists do not believe such a low-temperature sun
to be possible. Even the certainty of the eleven-year sunspot cycle has been
upset. Carrying forward researches of the 19th century astronomers Gustav Sporer
and E. W. Maunder, Dr. John Eddy of the High Altitude Observatory in Boulder,
Colorado, finds that between 1650 and 1715 A.D. the sunspot cycle had
disappeared. (5) Because our sun is a star,
these findings have major implications for the study of any and all stars in the
physical universe. Many other examples might be given, and we shall have more to
say later on about contemporary scientific thought as philosophy.

EVOLUTION AND DARWINISM

Turning now to the idea of evolution itself, we find this is regarded by
most people as a process restricted to animate life forms and generally equated
with Darwinism and neo-Darwinism. But "Darwinism" strictly speaking
should more properly be used to mean Darwin's theory of the factors of
evolution. There were many evolutionists before Darwin, some of whom also
propounded theories about the constituents at work in the evolutionary process.
Just which factors really apply in animate evolution is, however, a still-moot
question for modern science. It happened that Darwin and his fellow worker,
Alfred Russel Wallace, thought out a coherent theory about certain factors which
at the time appeared to fit the known facts so well that their hypothesis won
the conviction of a large body of naturalists. The essence of Darwin's theory is
in the two words variation and selection, and not all the
agents he believed produced those results are accepted as such today. As Dr. de
Purucker points out, nobody denies that a process of evolution takes place on
earth; the debate has to do with the causes and the mechanisms. Very soon after
their joint presentation of the theory, Wallace found he could not agree with
some of Darwin's determinants. He published several studies of his own which
emphasized that Darwin's ideas were especially inapplicable in the case of man
— and that other factors, particularly man's unique brain, became operative. In
brief, Wallace contended that natural selection could have acted on man's body
in any marked degree only before man acquired the intellectual
capacities — the self-conscious awareness — which make him truly man. After
that, this self-awareness became the principal and overriding determinant in his
evolution, making him unique among all of earth's animate life forms. We shall
discuss some of Wallace's arguments in more detail later.

With regard to variation, Darwin's teaching that acquired
characters can be inherited had been disproved by biologists' studies and tests
long before the 1950s. The findings of the new biology, well attested by all the
available evidence, is that while a gene can make a protein, and a mutant gene a
modified protein, the character of a protein cannot be communicated back to the
genes. Genetics at a molecular level is a one-way street. Effects of the
environment which alter the outward character of the animate life form cannot
alter that organism's genes in any coherent way, as proposed by Darwin.
Nevertheless, biologists recognize that a reciprocal influence between life
forms and their environments takes place, but they admit their ignorance of the
causes or exactly how the interaction works.

For want of any better theory most biologists still rely largely on Darwin's
factor of natural selection as a broad description of the process of
evolutionary change, some also continuing to maintain that it explains
changes that arise in animate life forms. But in the late 1960s one school of
evolutionary theory, led by certain Japanese molecular biologists, challenged
the idea that natural selection offers any explanation at all of evolutionary
change, because experimental results failed to show that a process of such
selection could have any preference for this or that version of a molecule.
Since then, many molecular biologists have in fact begun to take it for granted
that natural selection does not always apply. (6)

Mutations, which produce visible changes in life forms, arise in genes.
Certain environmental factors appear to be responsible for certain mutations,
but only for a very few, so far as biologists know. Moreover, not all mutations
are found to conform to Mendel's laws, and there appears to be no explanation
for what causes such mutants to arise in the DNA material. The situation at the
current frontiers of the study of genetics and evolution is, then, that there
are a number of theories in need of supporting facts! Having pursued to the
atomic and molecular level the quest for the source and mechanisms of animation
or "life," biologists find themselves reduced to chemical
descriptions. They are back to a "random factor" — evolution governed
by "chance," mutations which arise "spontaneously" — and
most will acknowledge that these words when applied to the phenomena they study
signify no more than that their actual causes remain unknown.

What this means in simple terms is that many if not all of the settled
notions about the key factors affecting animate evolution, derived from
Darwinism, are again at issue as a result of the new biology's observations and
experiments. Thus a series of imposed theoretical conceptions that long
dominated all consideration of those things which make man what he is, have been
cleared away. This could result in some measure of serious attention being given
to those inner and spiritual factors behind the evolutionary phenomena
— especially of human beings — pointed to in this book. We note in particular
Dr. de Purucker's references to the powerful, indeed dominant, influence from
within the entity of the "dhyan-chohanic fluids" (cf. ch. 16, "The
Weismann Theory"), with their practically unlimited individual potentials.
Such potentials are, he says, checked in physical manifestation by karmically
originated electro- and psychomagnetic conditions of the environment or field of
action.

SIMIANS STEM FROM MAN, A FAR OLDER LINE

This leads up to the theosophical teaching that man is the originant
of the simian stocks, rather than the reverse; that man's origin was not
monogenetic but took place through a modified polygenesis; and, that man as a
thinking being is far older than modern anthropology has thus far allowed him to
be. Since Dr. de Purucker's book was issued, archaeology and anthropology have
brought to light a wealth of new information on prehistoric man and anthropoid.
Much of it upholds the theosophical material he discussed and helps to restore
man to man — no beast, but a higher being poised between the animals and the
gods, unlike any other on the face of the earth.

Modern anthropology, however, takes no account of man's spiritual ancestry
nor of his ethereal beginnings on this globe in this round as the originant
of all mammalian stocks, as discussed by Dr. de Purucker. Not all
anthropologists are even in agreement as to which fossil forms of primates fall
definitely within the family of the Hominidae. This Appendix uses the term
Hominidae, or hominid, its Anglicized variant, for all of the forms man's
biological ancestors have assumed here on earth — i.e., for the
family of forms, both living and fossil, which are strictly human (7) — as opposed to the Pongidae, the primate family composed of
the tailless anthropoid apes which resemble man anatomically: gibbon, gorilla,
orangutan, and chimpanzee, and their ancestors. Such a usage has the
advantage that it accords with the theosophical perspective of the primacy of
the human line both biologically and spiritually with respect to the mammals.

Several years ago the respected contemporary Finnish anthropologist, Bjorn
Kurten, affirmed that the evidence of primate fossils themselves (in contrast
with any theory) points unmistakably to the fact that man never descended from
apes, but that it would be more correct to say that apes and monkeys descended
from early ancestors of man (cf. his book, Not from the Apes, Pantheon
Books, Random House, New York, 1972). Like Dr. de Purucker, this scientist
maintains that in all the traits under comparative examination, man is the
primitive while apes and monkeys are the specialized form. Space does not permit
anything like a full recapitulation of Dr. Kurten's extensive, detailed
anatomical comparisons in support of this thesis. Years of study have shown him
that in all cases where sufficient fossil material is available to enable
inspection of key skeletal features, there is no mistaking a hominid or early
human form for a simian form. Dr. Kurten observes that as far back as the
earliest Australopithecines, which have been dated at some 4 to 6 millions of
years before the present (8), the
anatomical evidence confirms an upright posture for man. This is not the case
for the simians, whether fossil or living, no ape being a biped in the sense
that man is. He considers it most unlikely that any human ancestor ever walked
on all fours in ape-fashion, or knuckle-walked as do African chimpanzees and
gorillas. The fossil record of the many specializations which all living apes
exhibit (compared with man's unspecialized structure) shows these to have arisen
independently. Dr. Kurten recounts that a fossil upper jaw of a primate,
unearthed in the Nagri formations of the Siwalik Hills of northern India in the
early 1930s and regarded as that of an ancient ape, had been named Ramapithecus
by G. E. Lewis. Noting some remarkably manlike traits in it, Lewis boldly
classified Ramapithecus as a hominid. Shortly after, W. K. Gregory and
M. Hellman, noted authorities on primate dentitions, corroborated Lewis's
conclusions and the three published their findings. In spite of this, hardly
anyone took notice and the fossil was virtually ignored until the late 1960s.
Then Elwyn L. Simons, a leading paleontologist at Yale University, and David R.
Pilbeam, a former student of Simons, carried out a careful analysis of it and of
other similar fossils resting forgotten in museum cases in several parts of the
world. Their study provided convincing evidence that Ramapithecus was
not simian as the name implies, but hominid.

Meanwhile Louis B. Leakey, working in the Fort Ternan area of Kenya, East
Africa, had found a fossil upper jaw of another type of Ramapithecus. The
Nagri formations where the many Indian specimens were found are dated in a range
of 8 to possibly 14 million years B.P. (9)
Those at Fort Ternan are given a good 14 million years, making the African
Ramapithecus the older. Other finds of this fossil hominid have since
turned up also in Europe and China, but those of Africa remain the oldest so far
discovered.

In Dr. Kurten's view the significance of Ramapithecus is that man
had long been regarded as a descendant of Dryopithecus — that is, of
a simian form possibly 6 or 7 million years old.
(10) Ramapithecus then showed a
true hominid form to have been in existence for at least as long as Dryopithecus!
But the decisive contribution of Ramapithecus is the proof it affords
that hominids show no convergence towards the simians as we go back from the
most recent (around 7 million years) to the oldest (14 million years). Even
those earliest forms of Dryopithecus have the specialized dentition —
notably the peculiar premolars — characteristic of apes, whereas the hominid
forms have a primitive premolar; and science knows of no case in which a
comparable specialization has been lost, once attained, by a reversal to the
primitive condition.

This Finnish scientist extends his argument even further. More recent finds
by Simons in 1966 of fossil primate remains in the Fayum badlands southwest of
Cairo, Egypt, have been dated in a range of 25-30 million years B.P. Yet these
remains exhibit the same distinct skeletal differences between simian and
hominid forms (11) as do those dated
millions of years closer to the present, described above. All the simian fossils
at Fayum are of very small creatures, the biggest,
Aegyptopithecus, being no larger than the present-day gibbon. A clear
lack of convergence between hominid and simian forms has thus been carried back
as far as some 20 or more million years.

Dr. Kurten sums up his cogent analysis of the meaning of this fossil record
by concluding that "the most logical answer suggested by the fossil
evidence is this: hominids are not descended from apes, but apes may be
descended from hominids" (op. cit., p. 42). His conclusion, based not on
any mere theory but on expert examination of "hard" evidence, closely
parallels, as far as it goes, the theosophical view. Theosophy, or the ancient
wisdom, avers that thinking, physical man as a distinct type has been in
existence on earth for almost 19 million years. It is important, however, that
such statements be properly understood when applying them to the anthropological
record we are here considering. Theosophy does not say that all
hominids gained self-consciousness at precisely the same period in far-past
time. The process of lighting the fires of mind in man, which began between
18-19 million years ago among the karmically ready stocks, undoubtedly went on
for millions of years thereafter for the less-ready, and cannot really be said
to have utterly ceased until the 'door' into the human kingdom was 'closed' by
nature at the midpoint of the fourth root-race, said to have been reached around
8 or 9 million years ago. Thus, a really enormous latitude is allowed for
individual variation in development of the human mind and its physical focus —
the brain — within the whole of the Hominidae, or family of man: that
is to say, among its different genera.

Another fossil primate discussed by Dr. Kurten, that of a creature named
Oreopithecus, has been dated at about 12-13 million years old —
contemporary with forms of Dryoithecus, Pliopithecus
(an ancestral gibbon) and Ramapithecus. All known
Oreopithecus fossil remains come from coal strata in Italy, and fossil
fragments of it have been known since 1871. A lucky find in 1958 of a complete
skeleton of this four-foot-tall creature, at Bacinello in Tuscany, showed it to
have a number of curiously manlike traits in its teeth, jaws, skull and hipbone.
Oreopithecus currently fascinates many anthropologists because it is
perhaps the one kind of ancient primate — one of the oldest known, in fact —
whose convergence with man appears to them to go further than any other. Another
fossil discovery in 1957 consisting of very large jaws and isolated teeth, found
only in Kwangsi Province in southern China, is that of Gigantopithecus.
Although regarded as a pongid, this form also displays several manlike
traits including reduced canine teeth.

What significance has all this for our discussion? First, the farther back
we go, the fossil record shows no evidence of any tendency for hominid forms to
display apelike characters, while, on the other hand, some exceedingly ancient
fossil ape-forms are found turning up with certain hominid-like
anatomical characters. How can this be explained? It is certainly susceptible of
an explanation under the theosophical view of the origin and evolution of the
simians: (a) that the monkeys arose from fruitful unions between a "mindless"
or unself-conscious hominid stock and a high beast stock — which we can
tentatively date at some 20-26 million years before the present; and (b) that
the anthropoids resulted some 8 or 9 million years ago from fruitful unions of a
degenerate human stock with descendants of the earlier miscegenations,
quasi-beast stocks of types that have since died out. (Cf. The Secret
Doctrine, II, 184, 191-2, 689;
see also ch. 12 in the present volume.) In far past geological times
both these simian stocks, says Dr. de Purucker, resembled their respective human
half-parents in much fuller measure than do their present-day descendants, the
living monkeys and apes. The earlier stocks were much nearer in time to the
dominant human influence taking its rise within their heredity. The living
simians show the effects of specialization away from that influence over the
intervening millions of years. This may be seen in the embryos as well as in the
infant members of present-day simian stocks — especially the ape stocks. Both
the embryo and the infant are much more "human" in appearance than are
the adults.

Moreover, contemporary anthropology does not consider the possibility that
some of the earlier hominid-like fossil forms — such as perhaps Oreopithecus
and some even of the Australopithecines or other so-called near-men — may
well be examples of early miscegenations which brought into existence these
stocks of beings intermediate between higher animals and man. These hybrids
would be outside of the true human line and, as said, have become extinct. Only
their more degenerated or animal-like descendants, the apes and monkeys,
continue to survive in several parts of the world and to intrigue scientists
because of their faint and blurred biological resemblances to true hominids.

THE HOMINIDAE ARE POLYGENETIC

We see, then, that there is important scientific data which tends to
substantiate man's great age as a form superior to that even of higher animals
contemporaneous with him in time. What is of almost greater interest for our
discussion is that some anthropologists are interpreting recent findings in a
manner to suggest a polygenetic or polyphyletic human ancestry rather than the
monogenesis of earlier theory. This new perspective, based upon study of actual
fossil materials, deals so far with a period of some few millions of years only.
Nevertheless it is suggestive of the far broader theosophical statement that
man's first root-race — many, many millions of years B.P. — exhibited a
modified polygenesis.

According to the teachings of the theosophical tradition, seven distinct
human stocks — what could be called genera of Hominidae — took their
contemporaneous rise in different localities on the earth. In their earlier
expressions these groups closely resembled each other, certainly until the
unfolding of self-consciousness began to take widespread effect among them
during the latter part of the third root-race. Because of the differing rates
and manners in which that new awareness made its impress upon the individual
units, differentiation of form among the various hominid stocks became
relatively accelerated. The maximum expression of such diversity among human
genera was approached toward the close of the first half of the fourth
root-race, about 8 or 9 million years ago. Then, this differentiation of form
reached its acme, and radically distinctive types of human beings were to be
found coexisting on the earth. (12)

Since that time, as the trend of nature downward into matter has begun to
reverse itself on the upward arc, the human stocks have slowly tended to assume
the same kind of form. Only four among the primitive seven stocks still remain,
we are told, and as a result of intermingling even these now differ so little
except in some superficial particulars that it is possible everywhere to
distinguish immediately a human being — be it even abnormal in development —
from any other animate life form on earth. Does the scientific picture tend to
negate or to corroborate that offered in modern theosophy? To answer this
question we must review the explosive changes that have taken place in
anthropology since 40 and even 30 years ago.

In the 1940s the evolutionary line of man's direct ancestors — i.e., of the
genus Homo — was generally thought by scientists to be not more than
500,000 years old at the very most. It was held to begin with the so-called Java
and Peking man, now termed
Homo erectus. In 1959, largely but certainly not exclusively as a
result of discoveries made in East Africa by Louis and Mary Leakey, estimates
for this ancestry were moved back dramatically to about 1.6 million years B.P.
Then, in 1972 their son Richard Leakey found a fossil hominid skull and
thighbones remarkably like those of modern man, in deposits dated at about 2.6
million years before the present. Anthropological notions of the age of our
immediate ancestors were extended almost another million years. In October 1975
Mary Leakey announced discovery in Laetolil, Tanzania, at a site not far from
those of earlier finds, of jaws and teeth of a type of the genus Homo
in deposits that have been assigned a firm date of some 3.75 million years B.P.
A year previously, in 1974, in Ethiopia's desolate Afar Triangle area to the
north of the region worked by the Leakeys, Dr. Donald C. Johanson of Case
Western Reserve University unearthed a near-complete female hominid skeleton
provisionally dated at about 3.5 million years old. Other anthropologists
working in East Africa have also found fossil remains of early hominid types
that have been assigned comparable ages.

In their recent epochal fieldwork in Africa, Richard Leakey and Dr. Johanson
have shared their findings and ideas all along the line. One result of their
work has considerable importance for the ethical perspective de Purucker's book
conveys as part and parcel of its scientific information: the absolute need of
practical brotherhood among all men if we are to accomplish our evolutionary
journey. Speaking at Pasadena City College in the spring of 1975, Richard Leakey
presented film clips of life and work among the present native inhabitants along
the shores of Lake Turkana (formerly Lake Rudolf) in East Africa. The films
demonstrated how those people have learned to share among the whole community,
without individual rivalry, what the surroundings offer for their survival.

Leakey then emphasized that his study of prehistoric men has shown him that
they too must have lived together cooperatively, in a manner completely at
variance with that of the "aggressive savage," as our forebears are so
often stereotyped nowadays in some popularized anthropological books. The "stones
and bones" of men more than a million years old, he said, have convinced
him that within their own ecosystem early men must have displayed as much
intelligence and as full a sense of human solidarity and compassion as do some
modern men within their ecosystems which, though more highly structured and
complex in material gadgetry, are not so different in terms of essential needs
and interests. In other words, the need for brotherhood as a central force was
just as vital for successful human evolution millions of years ago as it is
today; and further, that we — modern Homo sapiens — owe our
existence not to our ancestors' "naked ape" aggressiveness but rather
to their ability to cooperate.

Just a year later, in the spring of 1976, Dr. Johanson and his team
announced discovery in the Afar Valley of about 150 bones from a group of two
children and three to five adults, all of whom were found together and are
thought to have been killed in a flash flood or similar catastrophe. This is the
first time that a group of fossilized individuals closely related genetically
has been found, and Dr. Johanson believes they can tell us much about the growth
and development of their species. Johanson has classified that group as Homo
or man, although not as advanced as Homo erectus, and assigned them a
date of at least 3 million and probably 3.5 million years B.P. In a joint press
conference sponsored by the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C.,
Johanson and Richard Leakey discussed their newest finds and both emphasized
that the evidence of the fossil record is that "man is innately
cooperative," for prehistoric men hunted in groups and did other things
together and "returned to a home base." Leakey said:

One begins to see a picture of a social unit unlike that seen in any other
animal. It's not just the old bones we're interested in. It's important to know
if our earliest ancestors were decent, cooperative creatures instead of killer
apes. I'm sure man was a predator. But to kill, to be like us, to kill out of
being nasty — there's no evidence of that at all in the fossil record. — As
reported in The Washington Post, March 9, and
The National Observer, March 20, 1976

The general view among anthropologists has been that human social groups
were a comparatively recent development, dating back little more than 60,000
years to the time of Neanderthal man! (13)

Contemporary paleoanthropological discovery has made it clearer that several
types of hominids as well as "near-men" — such as Australopithecus
— pursuing parallel but different lines of evolution must have shared the
earth contemporaneously. Numbers of respected anthropologists, among them Alan
Houghton Brodrick (14), hold this view
although it is by no means universally accepted. Johannes Hurzeler, director of
the Basel Natural History Museum in Switzerland who received the 1958 Oreopithecus
find at Bacinello, believes this creature to have been on a line of
parallel evolution to that from which modern man descends, but that it was a "blind-alley"
form which died out. At the joint press conference just mentioned, Leakey
produced evidence for a 1.5 million year old Homo erectus
in Africa, and said that the Peking and Java examples previously assigned
an age of about 500,000 years are probably much older. He sees two other species
as having coexisted with Homo erectus on the earth more than a million
years ago, although these subsequently have disappeared as types. The
perspective of parallel development, accompanied by the extinction of various
early stocks, does much to explain why anthropologists cannot connect all
existing fossils of manlike creatures into one straight line of succession
leading to modern man.

With regard to the Hominidae — the much broader category of the family of
man as a whole, and not solely Homo sapiens or our direct and
immediate ancestors — there has unfolded the equally impressive extension into
past time discussed above. As recently as the late 1940s anthropologists —
still searching for a common link between pongid and hominid — were of the
general opinion that these began separate courses of evolution from some common
ancestor, mostly thought to be Dryopithecus, about 6 or 7 million
years ago. Furthermore, reclassification in the late 1960s of Ramapithecus
and its coordination with related fossil evidence in other parts of the
world, showed that varieties of true hominids — of types naturally less evolved
than those of our own genus Homo — existed as long ago as 15 and
possibly as much as 20 or more million years B.P.

The 3 or 4 million years currently allowed our genus Homo shows
man to have been man, and nothing less than man, pretty much as we know him
anatomically and in terms of brain development, for a hitherto unsuspected
antiquity. That period of time is, incidentally, just about the span of duration
that modern theosophy assigns for the present or fifth root-race type of man
since its earliest or seeding appearance as a variant or sport within
and toward the middle of its parent fourth root-race. But as a race or stock
exhibiting its own specific character completely distinct from that of its
parent race, our fifth-race humanity is accorded an age of about one million
years only. The emerging fossil record, nevertheless, appears to show that a
range
of hominid as well as near-hominid types overlapped with this early Homo,
which itself displayed a number of differences within its own genus.

In order to avoid any misunderstanding, it must be pointed out that
theosophy does not say that all of these fossil types of hominids formed part of
the stream of human evolution that has led directly to Homo sapiens sapiens
or the contemporary type of man. Which of them did is, of course, highly
controversial. As one reviewer recently put it, "whoever makes assertions
about human ancestry enters a minefield," because of the comparatively
rapid accumulation of new fossil and associated evidence, as well as the
changing ideas of scientists about how human biological evolution has proceeded
from prehistory into the present.

The striking transformation in anthropology is still going on. It has far
from convinced all anthropologists that hominids are not derived from some true
pongid progenitor; however, it has
shown that any such hypothetical divergence could have occurred only in an
exceedingly remote past — an estimated 20 million or more years ago, to use a
round figure. We would be making a mistake to infer from the argumentation in
this Appendix that all anthropologists think alike about the wealth of fossil
evidence that has been and is being amassed or even about the dates assigned it.
Scientists do not hold identical theories regarding the meaning of hominid and
simian fossil features, nor even agree always as to which may be hominid and
which simian. Nevertheless a picture is emerging that is a great deal clearer
than that which confronted the anthropologist of fifty or sixty years ago.
Incomplete as it may still be — and it is imperfect — overall it is found to
support the anthropogenesis outlined in volume II of H. P. Blavatsky's The
Secret Doctrine. (15)

In brief, the distinction between anthropology and the ancient wisdom is
mainly one of approach. The former seeks to develop a viable evolutionary theory
on the basis of the physical changes that are known to have taken place in
bodily forms; the latter regards man primarily as a monad of conscious energy
which evolves a succession of material vehicles for the purpose of expressing
ever more fully its inherent potential.

THE MYSTERY OF THE HUMAN BRAIN

In recent years increased scientific attention has been paid to a phenomenon
in man that is truly remarkable if he is to be regarded as just a higher animal
and nothing else. In terms of geological time and the terribly slow pace of
evolutionary change and development required by Darwinian theory, the record of
fossil Hominidae reveals a spectacularly sudden increase in the size of the
human braincase relative to any other mammalian life form. Cranial expansion is
centered largely upon the cerebrum or anterior portion of the brain which in all
higher mammals overlies the rest of the brain. The human cerebrum consists of
right and left hemispheres and connecting structures and is held to be the seat
of the conscious mental processes, in contrast with the cerebellum or the lobes
of the brain situated behind and beneath the cerebrum. The cerebellum is the
seat of involuntary control of the body's physical movements, translating the
cerebrum's general instructions into precise commands. The larger the cerebrum,
generally speaking, the greater the area of cortex or surface layer of
convoluted pinky-grey matter. The number of these cortical convolutions is held
by science to be a kind of index in man of comparative "brain-power"
or thinking capacity. The beasts show no cerebral or cortical development
comparable to man in terms of the so-called "associational" or "interpretive"
cortex of the frontal and parietal lobes. (16)
This is the brain area assumed to be responsible for thought and
self-consciousness.

The human brain remains an enigma for scientific investigators. It actually
is, in the conception of neuroscience, three and perhaps four brains. The
brainstem, known as the "old" brain or "reptilian" brain, is
at the top of the spinal cord. Above and in front of it is the limbic brain or "old
mammalian" brain. The limbic brain consists of the amygdala, pituitary and
pineal glands, hippocampus, thalamus and hypothalamus: a cluster of small,
vitally important structures that scientists believe were left over from an
earlier phase of mammalian evolution. These structures still regulate, monitor
or censor much of the body's autonomic nervous system and emotions. They also
affect what is going on in the cerebrum, the "cognitive" or third
brain. This third or "new mammalian" brain envelops the others and
dominates the brain's appearance. The cerebellum, the fourth major structure,
lying under the "bump" at the back of the head, is usually considered
as outside of the three-part brain.

Here, too, we find some links with the theosophical conception of the human
brain as a whole and also in regard to the functions of the pineal and pituitary
bodies (see chapter 15 of this book for further reference). As Dr. de Purucker
tells us, the two structures of the limbic brain known as the pituitary and
pineal glands receded from view during our early racial evolution in proportion
as conscious mentation or reasoning — a function of manas or "mind"
— became dominant as a human activity toward the end of the third root-race.
But in distant future eras those glands — the bodily seat of man's spiritual
intuition and cosmic vision of truth — will reemerge into conscious use and may
well bring about some further physical transformation in the shape and size of
the human braincase or skull.

Let us return to the puzzle of man's present braincase size. A well-known
anthropologist, Dr. Loren Eiseley, has quoted the blunt statement of two
scientists, M. R. A. Chance and A. P. Mead, that "no adequate explanation
has been put forward to account for so large a cerebrum as that found in man"
(Symposia of the Society for Experimental Biology, VII, "Evolution,"
Academic Press, New York, 1953; p. 395). This means, we infer, no biological
or no Darwinian explanation. Dr. Eiseley then states that while
all other mammalian life forms exhibit particular physical
specializations, man has a curious specialization of his own of a more abstract
and generalized type: his brain. Man's brain is more than twice as large as that
of a much bigger related creature (the gorilla), and trebles in size during the
first year of life outside the womb, unlike anything else we know in the world
of animate life forms. Inasmuch as the human brain is the acknowledged seat and
focus of man's consciousness, and it is man's consciousness which makes him what
he is compared with the beasts, Dr. Eiseley has here recorded the scientific
complement of the time-honored axiom that man is not his body but the thinker
within.

An imaginative scientist, Dr. Eiseley ponders the explosive suddenness with
which man "escaped out of the eternal present of the animal world into a
knowledge of past and future," and concludes that "the story of Eden
is a greater allegory than man has ever guessed."

There is every reason to believe that whatever the nature of the forces
involved in the production of the human brain, a long slow competition of human
group with human group or race with race would not have resulted in such similar
mental potentialities among all peoples everywhere. Something — some other
factor — has escaped our scientific attention. — The Immense Journey,
Random House, New York, 1946; p. 91

The theosophist recognizes that just such a process, which is termed the "descent
of the manasaputras," is indeed the "factor" which sets man apart
and above his companion species on earth. Through creative spiritual acts,
evolutionally older beings senior in standing to our humankind, endowed the
Hominidae with a portion of their own self-consciousness. In other words, the
allegory of the exit of Adam and Eve from a "Garden of Eden" depicts
man's transformation from unself-consciousness into self-awareness. From this
ensued our realization of time and space, of past and future, as well as
nature's demand that we engage in self-reflective cognition as decision makers
who have assumed full responsibility for our thoughts and acts.

As scientific analysis Dr. Eiseley's declaration implies the recognition
that at some still undefined former time (for science) there took place a
primordial linkage of bright intelligence with bone, muscle and nerve
tissue in a manner that had never occurred before, and that dramatically and
forever after revolutionized the development of our kind. He does not dogmatize,
but leaves his readers to draw their own inferences from his presentation.
Nevertheless, it is fair to conclude that Eiseley believes such an event or such
a process is that "other factor" which has escaped attention.
(17)

At this point several remarks are worth making about the findings of modern
neuroscience concerning the human brain. Many brain investigators continue to
believe that when matter is organized with sufficient complexity — as it is in
the brain — it begins to manifest the qualities we associate with the mind.
This of course is the orthodox stand of the reductionists among scientists:
those who attempt to explain all biological processes by the same explanations
(as by physical laws) that chemists and physicists use to interpret so-called
inanimate matter.

Brain research remained slow until just the past several decades, however,
and of the five or six men regarded as foremost in this field several think
differently from their reductionist colleagues; all of them in one way or
another are described as having come to a religious or mystical feeling about
the nature of human consciousness as a result of their own scientific work. In
particular one of these leaders, Sir Charles Sherrington, after a long and
brilliant career studying the human brain, could say no more than that "we
have to regard the relation of mind to brain as not merely unsolved, but still
devoid of a basis for its very beginning" ("Wraparound,"
Harper's, vol. 251, December 1975; p. 6). Sherrington concluded
that man's being consists of "two fundamental elements" — brain and
mind — and that brain action does not explain the mind. In 1975 his outstanding
pupil, Dr. Wilder Penfield, after an equally long and successful career in brain
research, came out emphatically with the same view, saying:

Because it seems to me certain that it will always be quite impossible to
explain the mind on the basis of neuronal action within the brain, and because
it seems to me that the mind develops and matures independently throughout an
individual's life as though it were a continuing element, and because a computer
(which the brain is) must be programmed and operated by an agency capable of
independent understanding, I am forced to choose the proposition that our being
is to be explained on the basis of two fundamental elements. This, to my mind,
offers the greatest likelihood of leading us to the final understanding toward
which so many stalwart scientists strive. — The Mystery of the Mind,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1975; p. 80.

So again we see a situation resulting from intensive recent research in one
branch of the new science that has brought rigorously scientific, honest
researchers — some of the foremost in the field — to recognize that the forces
at work in man's mind are distinct from the biological operation of his brain.
An even closer approach to the theosophical perspective in this connection is
found in these words of Dr. Oliver Sacks, a neuropsychologist at Albert Einstein
College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, and the author of several books
about human consciousness:

The entire organism is a functional unity: thus we are not conscious with
our cortex alone; we are conscious with the whole of ourselves. . . . It cannot
be supposed that the origination of consciousness lies in us alone. Our
consciousness is like a flame or a fountain, rising up from infinite depths. We
transmit and transfigure, but are not the first cause. We are vessels or funnels
for what lies beyond us. Ultimately we mirror the nature which made us. Nature
achieves self-consciousness through us. — "Wraparound," December
1975; p. 5

THE CONTRIBUTION OF ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE

For his part, Dr. Eiseley has done the cause of truth a real service by
resuscitating some of the findings and conclusions of Alfred Russel Wallace,
Darwin's great contemporary. It was Wallace, for example, who generously named
their jointly-discovered theory "Darwinism." It was also Wallace who
in 1913 protested that the Piltdown skull did not prove much, if anything, about
human evolution. This famous cranium and jaw, forty years later shown to be a
hoax, had seemed to many Darwinists to substantiate their notions of a "missing
link" between pongid and hominid that would prove man's descent from a
simian progenitor. But Wallace did not believe what the Piltdown skull seemed
to reveal about the nature of the process by which the human brain had
evolved.

Darwin had seen in the rise of man with his unique brain only the undirected
play of such natural forces as he believed had produced the rest of the living
world of plants and animals. Wallace, however, early abandoned this view and
asserted instead a theory of a divinely directed control of the human
evolutionary process. Darwinists in their desperate search for the required
missing links between man and ape were depicting living aboriginal peoples as
fulfilling that role! Wallace, on the basis of many years' experience among such
tribes in tropical archipelagoes, refuted the Darwinists' contention that they
were mentally inferior. He asserted that, to the contrary, the aborigines'
mental powers were far in excess of what they needed to engage in the simple
food-gathering activities by which they survived. Employing the Darwinists' own
arguments as applied to man, he asked: "How, then, was an organ developed
so far beyond the needs of its possessor? Natural selection could only have
endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he
actually possesses one but little inferior to that of the average member of our
learned societies." (18)

Today it is a commonplace of scientific knowledge that no race or people
enjoys superior mental potential over others. In essence, Wallace argued that
proof of rapid brain development would imply a divinely directed force at work
in man. Once man's mental powers awoke, his success or failure in the
evolutionary process would depend on mental and moral qualities rather than on
physical factors, and he would continue with very little physical modification
except insofar as the development of intellectual capacity was reflected in the
shape and size of the cranium. Those stocks which did not keep up that mental
and moral progress would, said Wallace, become extinct and give place to stocks
that did. All this is clearly theosophical. The Darwinians won the stage,
however, and Wallace's views, despite their logic and clarity, were virtually
ignored by later evolutionists. Wallace had also contended, and from the same
logical basis, that the closer this research came to the starting point of the
human family the more varied would be the bodily structure of hominids, in
conformance with the diverse effects mind or self-consciousness would produce in
different units — a theory that later anthropological discovery has done much
to uphold.

Certain advances in science correlative to findings about the human brain
need mention here. It is a fact that most contemporary anthropologists recognize
that purely biological explanations of human behavioral adaptation are
inadequate. While man, like all other animate life forms, must adjust to
environment, attempts to link human behavioral systems to simple geographic or
even genetic factors have always failed. Today scientists group those major
factors which they find exhibited in human adaptation under one word: culture
— that is, an integrated pattern which includes thought, speech, action and
artifacts, and depends upon man's capacity for learning and transmitting
knowledge to succeeding generations. Man is not born with culture, but with a
capacity to acquire culture. He does not, they affirm, merely react to
environment: he consciously changes, transforms and modifies it. While in
animals behavior is predominantly instinctual, in man it is almost entirely a
product of culture, imparted by teaching and learning, and does not reflect a
fixed set of drives as is the case with the beasts.

Writing in 1962, the leading geneticist of human evolution, Theodosius
Dobzhansky, clearly endorsed this view by saying that from very early times "man
has been adapting his environments to his genes more often than his genes to his
environments" (Mankind Evolving, Yale University Press, New
Haven, 1962; p. 319). In man, biological evolution is clearly subordinate to
cultural evolution; the chief determinants of human behavior are neither
anatomical nor genetical as they are in the beasts. Therefore human behavior is
a function and result of the inner consciousness that works largely
through the brain — that is, man's cerebrum.

Now, if we turn to modern theosophy we see that the origin of this
distinctive human culture is found in the tremendous "manasaputric event"
already referred to, which rapidly brought latent human consciousness forth into
activity. The awakened early human stocks of the latter part of the third
root-race are described as building the first cities of lava and stone,
cultivating the first crop plants, constructing the first implements and
artifacts, etc. In this view, then, culture is a reflection on this earth-plane
of the working of the distinctively human consciousness or monad to the degree
that that consciousness has learned to manifest its creative powers.
Manifestations of human creative faculties display imperfection and error, as we
all know — man often harming his environment as much as or more than he
helpfully modifies it, and then nature reacts upon him. Although physical
science and theosophy approach this topic from different angles or standpoints,
there is nevertheless a clear convergence of thought about it, regardless of
methods of analysis. This convergence has been aptly epitomized in the title of
the contemporary book, Man Makes Himself. (19) That study is only one example of what is in fact a growing
literature devoted to the uniqueness of human culture that may fairly be said to
have begun with the writings of Wallace. It is far too extensive for treatment
here.

SOME DISCOVERIES OF THE NEW BIOLOGY

Remarkable advances in genetics and cell study made by the new biology have
done much to substantiate Dr. de Purucker's statements that (a) what science
calls the cell is an infinitesimal focus of cosmic forces through which these
forces pour into physical manifestation; and (b) that there are uncounted and
actually almost innumerable possibilities of development, locked up or latent
potentialities, in a cell. These are all seeking expression, he said, and many
have to bide their time for ages before the opportunity comes, if it ever does:
that is, until the appropriate karmic environment or "field" furnishes
them with the open door to manifest. Of course, being a physical science, the
new biology has no formal conception of the invisible divine-spiritual monad
directing and urging the actions of those inner and metaphysical
forces, and its evidence has to do with the chemistry of genetics at the
molecular level only. But its testimony is nevertheless valid for our argument,
because these findings at the physical level harmonize with and indeed reflect
the implications of the broader theosophical statements. The latter encompass
findings or data from several levels of being in addition to the physical.
(20)

Since the 1940s biologists have conducted intensive investigations of vital
chemistry through what is known as molecular biology. This new field employs
electron microscopes capable of seeing the complex molecules from which animate
life is produced. Other equally remarkable techniques, such as X-ray
crystallography, also help push research nearer to the very borders where
physical life merges with astral life forces; biologists would not, as yet,
employ such a term as this last, which has to do with a plane beyond their
purview. To understand the findings of the new biology we must consider what it
says about vegetable, beast and human cells — that is, cells of animate life
forms, distinct from the life structures of the mineral and elemental kingdoms,
the latter being a theosophical term for the classes of natural forces on earth
which bind together the structures of all the planet's life forms (cf. ch. 18,
p. 220, "Lost Pages of Evolutionary History").

Every cell in animate life forms has the power of self-replication for the
life term of the individual unit containing it. But sex cells are, in the words
of Dobzhansky:

potentially immortal; indeed, every sex cell is able, under favorable
conditions, to give rise to a new individual with another crop of sex cells. The
soma is mortal; it is the body which houses the sex cells, and which is cast off
in every generation owing to death. Weismann's concepts of germplasm and soma
were an important landmark in the process of understanding heredity and
evolution. — Evolution, Genetics, and Man, John Wiley & Sons,
New York, 1955; p. 74

Isaac Asimov, a scientist writing more recently, after biological analysis
had successfully isolated the essential chemical ingredients of the germ plasm,
tells us:

In theory, it is even possible that . . . there are polynucleotide strands
that have persisted through countless generations, perhaps even from the very
first appearance of life. . . . the possibility of a super-patriarch among the
now-existing strands, straddling the eons since the earth was young, evokes a
rather breathtaking picture of the unity and continuity of life. — The
Genetic Code, Orion Press, New York, 1962; pp. 141-2

It is within the chromosomal material (Weismann's germ plasm) in the nucleus
of the sex cell that is found what the new biology terms the "genetic code":
the information which, transmitted to every cell newly appearing in the growing
life form, instructs it how to replicate. (The human body at full growth has an
estimated fifty trillion or more cells, derived from one original cell.) The
cell nucleus is composed of molecules of proteins and nucleic acids. These are
chemical substances which are universally present in all animate life as
nucleoproteins — large and highly-complex, energy-laden molecules. Protein
molecules in the cell's nucleus are made of some 20 amino acids. The DNA and the
RNA are the two types of nucleic acids which can be distinguished, each being
built of only six chemical components; it is these nucleic acids which carry and
transfer the genetic information. The DNA, but not the RNA, is the
characteristic nucleic acid of the chromosomes and their component genes in the
cell nucleus, and is the replicating material in cells. All cellular life, from
the more complicated viruses (the simplest form of animate life known) up to and
including man, is based upon DNA replication. (The RNA performs a messenger and
transfer role in carrying DNA-originated information to all components of the
cell.) DNA has been found to consist of two strands of what are called
polynucleotides, which form a double helix that is held together by "crossbars"
formed of four chemical bases joined together by weak hydrogen bonds. Biologists
estimate that an individual gene may consist of a nucleic-acid molecule made up
of a chain of between 200 and some 2,000 nucleotides. A human being may have as
many as 150,000 genes altogether.

Intensive experimentation into the molecular and atomic complexities of DNA
and its related materials is proceeding apace, and all the returns are not yet
in, of course. Nevertheless a broad conception of the genetic mechanism
governing cell formation and reproduction has already been arrived at, from
which emerge several facts of paramount interest for us.

First, the number of kinds of proteins — that is, the essential building
blocks of animate physical life — that can be built up out of the 20-odd amino
acids acting on instructions from the DNA, is for all practical purposes unlimited.
The question, then, is not where the body finds the variety of proteins it
requires, but what controls the possible variety and keeps it within
bounds. For, although the kinds of proteins required to form the vast array of
specialized cells in a human body are very great indeed, they are nonetheless
limited. Secondly and conversely, starting with only 250 genes (remember the
estimate of 150,000 for a single human being), there may be produced as many
particular kinds of sex cells having distinct combinations of genes as there are
electrons and protons in the universe, according to current scientific
estimates! Only a negligibly small fraction of all the potentially possible gene
combinations in any one species is ever realized. In man a single ejaculation
contains about 200 million spermatozoa. It is unlikely that any two spermatozoa,
or any two ova in woman, will contain the same combination of genes. In all
probability, except for cases of identical twins (which arise through division
of a single fertilized ovum), no two persons alive carry the same genes. Every
human being is, therefore, a carrier of a unique, unprecedented and probably
unrepeatable gene complex! (21) The
number of distinct individuals that can be composed by gene combinations in
sexual reproduction is also, then, to all intents and purposes
unlimited.

One scientific writer, Calder in The Life Game (p. 135), has
summarized the lessons of contemporary molecular biology in this way: (1) the
uniqueness of every individual; (2) the immense possibilities genetically latent
in every group of individuals; and (3) the fallacy of any notion of genetic
perfection. Thus, even at the level of the vital chemistry of animate life forms
we see the findings of science affirming the principles of the ancient teaching,
brought forward again in this book by Dr. de Purucker, that each entity is in
essence a monad: a completely individual unit or life-consciousness-center,
eternal as an essence. Every infinitesimal particle or point in the universe —
an incomputable multitude — enshrines such a spiritual monad; and each such
monad pursues or follows its own path or evolutionary course within broader
categories or houses of life that are moving along their respective
courses.

Molecular biology has also turned up some quite interesting facts about
human, ape, and monkey blood-serum chemistry. Tests of their respective DNAs and
three important blood constituents — hemoglobin, transferrin and albumen —
have shown the structural differences of these to be small between man and
pongids but much larger between man and monkeys. Within the pongids (including
the gibbons) differences between man and gorillas and chimpanzees were quite
small, but larger between man and orangutans and gibbons. A related kind of
test, called the immunological, has yielded comparable results.
(22) These measurements are valuable
because they show a taxonomic order among the primates: man is seen to be
related in a decreasing degree to the chimpanzee, gorilla, orang, gibbon, Old
World and then New World monkeys, and finally the various prosimians, in terms
of blood chemistry.

The test results have been employed by some molecular biologists to project
estimates as to how long ago man's evolutionary line separated from those of the
monkeys on the one hand, and the apes on the other, based on a theory that at
the time such divergences began all three life forms had about the same type of
hemoglobin. Sarich and others have devised a fairly comprehensive phylogenetic
tree of living primates giving estimated times of divergence. This compilation
has gorillas and chimpanzees — the African pongids (23) — splitting off from man about 5 million years ago, though
the researchers suggest that it happened "not more than" 10 and "not
less than" 5 million years B.P. Certain kinds of baboons are assigned a
date of origin at about 7 million years; gibbons and orangutans 12 million; some
Old World monkeys from 12 to 21 million years; and New World monkeys from 20 to
35 million years B.P. (Prosimians are estimated to have diverged as long ago as
75 million years.) The scientists who constructed this phylogenetic tree
emphasized that their concern is not so much with precise periods of years as
with general evolutionary relations, and they are undertaking similar tests and
projections with other mammalian stocks.

However, the student of theosophy does not necessarily subscribe to all the
inferences that various biologists are making from these new data, nor does he
accept all the details of their theories about them. There are probably a number
of significant inaccuracies attending their use as a dating technique, and this
is recognized also by the scientists themselves. What is seen in the data —
even when allowances are made for such inaccuracies and account is taken of the
very general nature of theosophical dating of simian divergences — is the most
interesting and suggestive "fit" that appears. The newer biological
projections uphold the older theosophical statements. The general relation of
the simian stocks to man is set out by Dr. de Purucker in chapter 7 of this
book: monkeys have a "single dose" and the apes a "double dose"
of human blood in their veins, but no human being has any simian blood in his or
her veins. (The author employed, of course, a figure to make his point and did
not engage in a precise chemical analysis of blood; that has now been supplied
by science, at least in part.) Theosophy places the point when the monkey line
arose from the human line as somewhat earlier than 19 million years ago, while
the beginnings of the anthropoid ape line, on the other hand, are given as
around 8, possibly 9, million years ago.

MODERN SCIENCE IS BECOMING PHILOSOPHY

A salient feature of the new science is that it has become more
philosophical. It is true that a number of outstanding scientists of the latter
part of the 19th century were quite philosophical; but their work and
conclusions were all too often smothered under the avalanche of materialistic
thought which swept over and dominated the sciences and persisted well into this
century, as the subject matter of its various disciplines became popularized.
The growing realization by scientists of the limits of their capability to
explain or even describe with any adequacy the full dynamism of life or the
facts of being became apparent in a public way only in the 1930s and '40s. To a
much greater extent it is humility which characterizes science in this last
quarter of the 20th century; for, as Bronowski recently mused:

One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture of the
material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to
prove that that aim is unattainable. . . . The world is not a fixed, solid array
of objects, out there, for it cannot be fully separated from our perception of
it. It shifts under our gaze, it interacts with us, and the knowledge that it
yields has to be interpreted by us. There is no way of exchanging information
that does not demand an act of judgment. . . . And that requires, not
calculation, but insight, imagination — if you like, metaphysics. — The
Ascent of Man, pp. 353, 364

Thus has this brilliant scientific thinker tacitly assented to the
theosophical proposition held by the entire ancient world that man is part
of the universe surrounding him, inseparable from it. Other scientists have
in their own way registered similar thoughts. In a series of essays questioning
where modern science is going, the great theoretical physicist, Max Planck,
titled one essay, "Is the External World Real?" That was in the early
1930s. Another German physicist, Max Born (1882-1970) in his autobiography said:
"I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy."

If we turn to astronomy, a field which Dr. de Purucker calls "the most
spiritual of the physical sciences," a similar panorama unfolds. In 1940,
for example, a well-known astronomer of the Mount Wilson Observatory in southern
California, Gustav Stromberg, composed a scientifically thoughtful book entitled
The Soul of the Universe. Much more recently Sir Bernard Lovell,
professor of radio astronomy at the University of Manchester and director of
Jodrell Bank, wrote in an article in The New York Times Magazine, November
16, 1975, titled "Whence: We Are What We Know about Where We Came From,"
based on his presidential address to the British Association:

Throughout the whole of recorded history a consistent thread has been the
intellectual purpose of man to discover the nature of the universe. Today we
refer to this as the cosmological problem: That is, how did the universe come
into existence, how did its current configurations — stars, solar systems,
galaxies — evolve, and what is its future? . . . Is the answer transcendental
or material?

Cosmology has in fact gained recognition as one of astronomy's three
principal activities; it may fairly be called the philosophical content of this
particular field of science. Most scientists would prefer using the term
theoretical rather than philosophical to describe the trend we are discussing.
But the word is not so important; the activity meant is clear — that is, a
rational search for the truths and principles of being as these can be uncovered
through the findings of science, rather than a concentration upon the potential
for material application in those findings.

It is not altogether strange that this development is most fully apparent in
the scientific fields that are particularly targeted at both extremes of the
range of observation of material phenomena open to man: the subatomic at one
end, and the galactic (or supergalactic) at the other. In both directions the
riddles — of subatomic particles and of the light from celestial objects so
distant that it has taken millions of years to reach us — are mental riddles,
intellectual riddles, spiritual riddles. Progress here can be made only as
scientists are willing to proceed with an open mind and an active intuition, so
as to be ready to accept new truth wherever and just as it is discovered, even
though it contradict all their current theories.

It has been said that the history of inquiry into the ultimate questions can
be analyzed as a succession of ages, each of which exhibits a certain dominant
or favorite mode of investigation into the facts of being. This is the
religious, which gives way to the scientific, and is in turn succeeded by the
philosophical. Dr. de Purucker has referred to this in his writings, noting that
what we call religion, science and philosophy — three aspects or ways of
looking at truth — are but the natural working of the threefold operations of
human consciousness. We cannot separate these fundamental operations of
consciousness, he says; and only their unified vision proclaims the recondite
facts of the whole of being. We see the dogmatic religious assertions of one era
cast aside, as men take a fresh and unencumbered look at themselves and
surrounding nature. Such prolonged, careful observation, steadily compiled and
compared, gives rise to clearer perceptions into nature's meaning. These,
eventually, lead to a new and fuller realization of the divine-spiritual heart
beating within and behind physical nature, its vehicle. In that manner the cycle
brings us again to religion; but with an improved and refined devotion, a deeper
and truer recognition of our oneness with all life, and a wiser understanding of
our role in the awesome procession of the universe.

1. Arthur March and Ira M. Freeman, The New World
of Physics, Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 1963; p. 133. This
book is based on an essay written by Professor March, late professor of
theoretical physics at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and published in
1957 in Hamburg, Germany. (return to text)

2. Cf. J. W. N. Sullivan, The Limitations of
Science, Viking Press, New York, 1933; p. 148 and passim. This is one of
the most lucid and comprehensive summaries of the revolution that has taken
place in science and in the thinking of the foremost scientists since the late
19th century when H. P. Blavatsky wrote. This British mathematician and
interpreter of physics (who died about 1940) is still regarded as one of the
most brilliant intellects of his time. (return to text)

3. Mendel Sachs, McGraw-Hill Book Co., New York. The
author was then professor of physics and astronomy at the State University of
New York in Buffalo. (return to text)

5. See Graham Massey, "What's Wrong with the Sun?",
The Listener, June 17, 1976; pp. 762-4. Massey's article is based
on a BBC2 "Horizon" television program, which he produced and
directed, that examined these and related discoveries in some depth. See also
the article "When the Sun Went Strangely Quiet," by Kenneth Frazier,
Science News, vol. 109, March 6, 1976; pp. 154-6; and "Solar
Variability: Is The Sun An Inconstant Star?" by Allen Hammond, Science,
vol. 191, March 19, 1976; pp. 1159-60. (return to text)

6. Cf. Nigel Calder, The Life Game, Viking
Press, New York, 1973; p. 65 and passim. The author is a former editor of
The New Scientist and science correspondent for The New
Statesman. (return to text)

7. The term genus Homo refers to the primate
genus within the Hominidae that includes modern man (Homo sapiens sapiens)
and a number of extinct species such as Neanderthal man. The term simian
refers to both monkeys and apes in general. Not all scientists, however, not
even the anthropologists themselves, use all these terms with equal precision.
They should be regarded as no more than the best guidelines science has thus far
devised for a relatively clear classification of the subject matter. (return to text)

8. References in this Appendix to the dating of fossil
materials by means of their associated deposits are, unless specified otherwise,
to the potassium-argon method, a radiometric technique that depends upon the
slow decay of a potassium isotope (potassium-40) into argon-40, a gas. It is
used to date materials having an age greater than about 60,000 years before the
present, and is restricted to volcanic and plutonic rock formations. Like all
other radiometric methods the potassium-argon cannot be regarded as a definitive
measurement of time periods, because it depends upon a belief in the constant
rate of decay of element-isotopes. There is no way to prove, for example, that 5
million years ago those isotopes were decaying at the same rate they are now,
especially if the earth and matter itself are credited with an evolutional
course of change. Although radiometric methods are those primarily employed by
much of contemporary science, we should accept their results as provisional at
best. (return to text)

9. The letters B.P. after a date mean Before Present, "present"
being considered for our purposes to be the present century. This system of
dating has much greater utility for geological time than does the B.C. — A.D.
system applied to our "local" time of recorded history. For the intent
is to convey the total age of sites and fossil remains for instant contemporary
understanding. Variations in the radiometric measurements of these can be as
much as plus or minus several thousand years, making use of the local system
almost meaningless. Use of the letters B.P. is becoming more widespread when
referring to time measurements of millions of years. (return to
text)

10. Dryopithecus is the name given an extensive
group of very early anthropoid apes now regarded as the radical form of all the
higher apes. Most fossil apes of the Miocene and Pliocene, with ages ranging
from about 5 to 7 million years to about 20 million years B.P., are now
classified within this single genus. Their earliest representatives appear in
Africa some 20 million years ago; those of Europe and Asia are dated
considerably later, about 15 million years B.P. (return to text)

11. Specifically, Oligopithecus and
Aegyptopithecus as distinctly ape- or monkey-like animals, and Propliopithecus
as hominid-like. (return to text)

12. It is worth noting that traditional records the world
over agree that very early man was generally of gigantic stature, while later
stocks have steadily decreased in size to what we see today. (return
to text)

13. The depiction of Neanderthal man of La
Chapelle-aux-Saints as a kind of half-monster — ungainly, ugly, brutish and
with head thrust forward between its shoulders as the anthropoids carry theirs
— which persisted as recently as 1957, has been shown as altogether untrue. In
that year the skeleton was examined by William Straus of Johns Hopkins
University and Alec Cave of St. Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College in
London. They found it was that of an atypical old man who had suffered from
arthritis of the jaws, spine and perhaps the limbs; and that the reconstruction
of the skull, especially at its base, was unsatisfactory. M. Boule, of the
Institute of Human Paleontology in Paris, who had examined and reconstructed the
skeleton between 1908-12, prepared the highly respected and highly misleading
report about Neanderthal's apelike posture and gait. It is now known that
Neanderthal — whose relatively extensive remains have since been uncovered in
Africa and Asia as well as Europe — walked as upright as do we and, if he could
be seen walking the streets of one of our cities, would attract no more
attention than many of its modern denizens. Neanderthal man lived "side by
side for long ages" with other types of Homo sapiens, and some of
his remains have been dated at between 120-200 thousand years B.P., according to
contemporary anthropological estimates. (return to text)

14. This well-known British anthropologist has assembled
a great deal of evidence for such a prospect in his study, Man and His
Ancestry, Premier Books, Fawcett World Library, New York, 1964. (return to text)

15. For a full and interesting account of the growth of
the idea of evolution from the time of the Greek philosophers until the early
19th century as seen by modern scholars, see The Great Chain of Being
by Arthur O. Lovejoy, Harvard University Press, 1936 and 1964. This book is
based on Lovejoy's delivery at Harvard University, 1933, of the William James
Lectures on Philosophy and Psychology. (return to text)

16. Some researchers, notably Dr. John C. Lilly, maintain
that dolphins and some whales, such as the sperm whale, have well-developed
associational areas of cerebral cortex, which they compare to that displayed in
the human brain. (return to text)

17. For his part, Dr. Kurten has also been struck by the
inexplicably rapid expansion in brain size in certain hominid forms relative to
others contemporaneous with them. He finds a strong probability that this took
place two or three million years ago, but is unable to account for its
occurrence:

"We can make guesses, and it is legitimate to do so, but we do not know
for sure. We can only say that, based on the evidence at hand, it seems that the
evolution of brain size was suddenly accelerated at least twice during
Pleistocene times" (Not from the Apes, p. 136).

He estimates the Pleistocene epoch to have begun something more than three
million years before the present. (return to text)

18. As quoted in Eiseley's The Immense Journey,
pp. 83-4. For a fuller exposition of Wallace's views, see his Contributions
to the Theoryof Natural Selection, especially ch. 9-10;
first printing, 1870; reprinted by AMS Press, New York, 1973. See also his
Darwinism, especially ch. 15, "Darwinism Applied to Man,"
Macmillan & Co., New York & London, 1889. (return to
text)

19. By V. Gordon Childe, Watts, London, 1942. Examples of
other works that discuss the scientific attitude toward human cultural evolution
are The Human Imperative by Alexander Alland, Jr., Columbia
University Press, New York, 1972; and Naked Ape or Homo Sapiens?,
by John Lewis and Bernard Towers, Garnstone Press, London, 1969. Dr. Alland is
an anthropologist, Dr. Towers an anatomist, and Dr. Lewis a scientific writer
with university training in science and anthropology. (return to
text)

20. But this distinction between the respective concerns
of science and theosophy is crucial, philosophically speaking. So much is this
so that we find H. P. Blavatsky saying that the only real quarrel between
theosophy and science is that the latter does not recognize the existence of an
astral or etheric plane within the physical plane, through which inner and
spiritual forces affect and shape the latter. (See TheSecret
Doctrine, II, 149.) (return to text)

21. While it is true that in the view of science
identical twins carry the same genes, each is in actual fact a unique, separate
individual, and this is well known even to laymen from simple observation. Here
we have an example of the limitations of current scientific attempts to explain
human individuality on the basis of genes alone; the cause and source of
individuality is more recondite, although the bodies or factors we call genes
may form an important part of the chemical mechanism that individuality uses for
its physical expression. (return to text)

22. See the article, "A Molecular Time Scale for
Human Evolution," by A. C. Wilson and V. M. Sarich (biochemists at the
University of California, Berkeley), in Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, vol. 63, September 1969; pp. 1088-93. For an
informative overview of this subject, see the article, "The New Science of
Human Evolution," by S. L. Washburn and E. R. McCown (members of the
Anthropology Faculty at the University of California, Berkeley), in the 1974
Yearbook ofScience and the Future, Encyclopaedia
Britannica, Chicago, 1973; pp. 33-48. Kurten, Not from the Apes, pp.
42-4, discusses these blood-serum findings and says that comparative anatomy
tends to support them; but he has his own views about their meaning and value. (return to text)

23. Gibbons and orangutans are found only in southeast
Asia. The fossil record causes anthropologists to believe the orang diverged
from man earlier than did the African apes, and the gibbon even earlier. Gibbons
are classified in a family called the Hylobates, sometimes held to be distinct
from the pongids, although they are regarded as anthropoids together with
gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees. Gibbons obviously descend from a very
ancient type of ape — possibly the oldest. (return to text)